Welcome to my book blog, updated whenever I get a chance.
The American Dream -- Suze Orman
I downloaded Suze Orman's The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream last night from my local library, and read it through. As always I like her comments and really appreciate her integrated approach: that is, money is a reflection of what's going on inside us, and in our ...
The Ice Princess: A Novel
The Ice Princess: A Novel by Carolina Lackberg is an awesome read! This is a Swedish writer, beautifully translated into excellent English. Spooky mystery, ancient secrets, and some characters who are absolutely living and breathing, in my head anyway. The beginning of a great series.
Busted!
Reading this again, first picked it up about two years ago when I was reading everything I could get my hands on about the great mortgage meltdown in the United States in 2009. This book attracts me because it hurts to see a regular family up close grapple with terrible ...
The Marriage Plot
I don't usually write about books I really dislike, but The Marriage Plot: A Novel has received so much positive press and I found it so depressing (dare I say, boring?). It's about three young people just leaving college, their angst and love affairs, etc, mental illness and denial, and ...
Fifty Shades -- post 2
"Uncle Brad has been very bad! When you get home, give him twelve spanks, and tell him he has to stay in bed. Tell him Maggie said so." -- Mistress Maggie, Age 7 The above true quote, dated July 30, makes me wonder just what they've got first graders reading these days. Fifty ...
the Secrets of Pain
The Secrets of Pain by Phil Rickman : at over 300 pages, it's the thickest and most intimidating of the Merrily Watkins books. I love the gothic, something-evil-in-the-English-countryside feel of this series, but they're starting to feel just a bit formulaic to me. Merrily struggles with her faith (she's an ...
Peculiar Children
PECULIAR certainly is the watchword here! In Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children the antique, authentic photos included with each chapter are spooky and rich with stories all by themselves. It's a kids' book, well written enough for an adult, but I would have liked it better as a young ...
Fitness
"if 30 minutes of daily walking were available by prescription, it would be the most prescribed medicine in the western world." Gotta love Sparkpeople.com 100% free fitness, exercise, nutrition trackers, community forums, recipes, daily updates, free fitness tools, message boards, and a free website option to connect with others in your ...
Tom is a gifted medic, a father figure . . . and a torture survivor.
Tom, 43, is a gifted medic, focused, intent, compassionate and thorough as he treats infections and lacerations in this community of damaged souls just outside Toronto. Despite a lifetime of poor health and an almost certain early death, his kindness, gentle care and fatherly attention are respected by all who ...
Hunger Games: Dangerous for kids?
Recently I've been reading critiques of Hunger Games, that the message is too violent for young people, that it glorifies kids killing kids, that the idea of watching killing as a "game", on reality television (!), is too extreme for the target audience. (View the initial post here.) I've also seen ...
Spiritual Musings
I tend to agree with Susan Howatch in Mystical Paths ,a really great novel a pretty normal, screwed-up family (makes me feel right at home), that different concepts of God are probably more about language, than about differing realities. Energy and Matter are one and the same, according to modern science. ...
Hunger Games -- Spoiler alert!
I cannot stop thinking about this book, three weeks later. Download it RIGHT NOW and read it on your laptop if you haven't yet. I'll wait . . . Back yet? Couldn't put it down, could ya? Reading this book is like falling in love: fascinating, exhillerating, profoundly uncomfortable. Here are a ...
Western Civilization, Education and Religion
True Confessions: I only skimmed this book, while waiting for a friend to pick me up at the library. The perfect title for Niall Ferguson's book would be "The Rise and Fall of Western Civilization", since that is his topic. Unfortunately, all the great titles are taken! So he calls ...Fifty Shades of Gray
Okay, so my sister recommended Fifty Shades of Grey-- -- and since she also loved the amazing Hunger Games as well, I promised to take a look. So far, I'm only about 75 pages in and yes, it is hot! I seriously cannot think of a less sexy location than an ...The Hunger Games: Read THIS if you read nothing else
It took me eight weeks to pick this up, and the only reason I did is because I promised my sister I would at Christmas, and then two days later someone else gave me a gift copy. It is a terrifying, brutal story written for "young" people, but like most ...
50 Self-Help Classics
Next up: 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books to Transform Your Life . . . I'm moving very SLOWLY through this compendium of brief summaries .. . also "The Science of Getting Rich" written almost 100 years ago. Watch this space!
Christine says . . .
This site is funded by the purchase of books through book links . . . so . . . Buy for yourself and 15 of your closest friends! Don't be shy!
A Sinner in School: Part I
I'm reading The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University by 21-year old Kevin Roose (he was 19 when he started writing this book). I picked this up at the library a few months ago and skimmed it. Just yesterday I downloaded the kindle version for $9.99; ...
Believing the Lie -- Elizabeth George
Well I didn't think I'd ever forgive Ms. George for killing off you-know-who two books ago. I mean, you don't just do that to your readers! So I boycotted What Came Before He Shot Her. So, my refusing to buy that book clearly taught this author a lesson, because this ...
Cures what ails ya
Just read The Cure: Heal Your Body, Save Your Life, Timothy Brantley. Definitely pretty extreme! He says forget modern medicine; eat only "living" foods, raw or "lightly seared" to get rid of the toxic sludge that causes pretty much every disease, he says, including cancer. Weirdly, I pretty much agree with ...
Secrets Lives of Wives
For sure, every relationship is very much it's own being and totally different (I suspect) from everyone else' idea of what a relationship "should" be. The basic premise of The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married, I think, is that WOMEN WHO ARE ...
Health and Fitness
Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health . Author William Davis, cardiac MD, says that removing wheat (in other words, the major source of gluten) from the diet of his patients cures overweight, diabetes, and all sorts of ill. Thought-provoking!
EXTRA Large
Last month I picked up a copy of Generation Extra Large: Rescuing Our Children from the Epidemic of Obesity -- so many kids growing up so obese. So sad! They provided some examples of positive programs to address this terrible epidemic, but I left with a pretty bad feeling about ...
Follow Up to A Sinner in School
Follow up to The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University by Kevin Roose - the end of this book was a bit of a let-down after the strong start. AFter a semester at Jerry Fallwell's Evangelical Christian college, he returned to Brown university to write about his ...
The Love Talker
Picked up The Love Talker by Elizabeth Peters (aka Barbara Michaels). I first read this years ago and even then it was old. As a teen, I really liked Barbara Michaels' gothic mystery thrillers because of the strong female leads, the cool, spooky atmosphere, and the cute understated romances between the ...This site is funded by affiliate book links so
Buy for the whole family!
